Me and my narratives

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Wednesday, 5 March 2014

In Ukrainian the country’s capital is spelt Kyiv
while in Russian it goes by the name of Kiev, though both languages use the Cyrillic
alphabet. Strange then that the Western media, such as the UK’s BBC, choose the
latter term to denote the city, despite being clearly in favour of the
protestors who played such a major part in deposing former president Viktor
Yanukovich recently.

This contradiction may seem superficial but in my
view it underpins much of the crisis that has gripped the nation of late.

It has frequently appeared to be a country that has
been split down the middle, almost symmetrically, with the people in the West
fervently anti-Russian and those in the East equally as pro.

However, the situation, as usual, is more
complicated than that. I have been to Ukraine twice, once to the Western city
of Lviv and the other time to the Black Sea resort of Odesa.

The first city is supposedly a hotbed of Ukrainian
nationalism, while in the second only Russian is spoken. Yet, when I was in
Lviv I communicated to hotel receptionists and taxi drivers using a hybrid of
Russian and Polish and had no negative reaction whatsoever. The irony was that,
despite being so Western-oriented, in Lviv daily routine matters were less easy
to manage than turned out to be the case in Odesa. Cash machines, for instance,
didn’t work properly, the waiting staff were surlier than in the East and
though there had been heavy snowfall, it took ages for the roads to be gritted.
It was like travelling back in time a decade.

Then there was another twist, slightly, when I was
in Odesa. I chatted regularly and casually with one of the waiters who worked
at the massive Soviet-era hotel I was staying at near the Black Sea beach. One
night in the bar on the television Russia were playing a qualifying match for
EURO 2012, partly to be played in Ukraine. I got talking to him about Andrei Arshavin,
the Russian striker, and what a good player he was. He agreed but was adamant that
while Arshavin was an excellent footballer, he was Russian, not Ukrainian as
was the waiter and this conversation happened in Russian,

In spite of all these complexities, it is clear that
Ukraine is close to being torn apart between East and West. It is not as if the
matter is unprecedented, however. When Poland’s marshal Pilsudski’s forces
marched into Ukraine to confront the Soviet Red Army in 1920 they were
initially beaten back until Lenin rashly ordered his forces into Poland itself
and was repelled by a national upsurge. It shouldn’t be forgotten, however,
that Leon Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, was firmly against the incursion
into Poland, arguing that you cannot export socialism. He was also Ukrainian by
birth.

As was Nestor Makhno, who during the Russian civil
war set up his own anarchist battalion called the Revolutionary Insurrectionary
Army of Ukraine. An anarchist, he took on every participant in the civil war,
including the Red Army, proving that the country is one riven by divisions.

That has not changed by all accounts. An impasse has
been reached where civil war is not off the cards. The question is who is
responsible for the current mess? Some say Russia, others point to Western
interference.

As the Moscow-based left-wing campaigner, Boris
Kagarlitsky, has often remarked, the apparent architect behind the turmoil,
Vladimir Putin, is an opportunistic bureaucrat without any ideological scruples
at all.

We can probably place Yanukovich in the same category too, alongside
the likes of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosovic. Though of seemingly
entrenched opinions, all three have been deeply sensitive to the swaying of
public opinion. Two have been felled by this position, it remains to be seen if
the third might also be.

Yet the West’s role in this affair is also
compromised. In the former Soviet bloc they have stuck their noses into Georgia,
in the so-called ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003, in Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan
in 2010. As with all these with all these high-profile confrontations, words
from either London, Washington or Berlin are likely to prove of no help at all.

Monday, 28 October 2013

Seems amazing that I had this published all those years ago, given my own history with drink, and the subject matter of other pieces on this blogspot, such as this and this. Was certainly one of my proudest moments at the time to have the article appear in such a prestigious journal.

Friday, 18 October 2013

No Brummie with a heart could be failed to be
moved by BBC 2’s recent six-part drama ‘Peaky Blinders’. Others from outside Birmingham have poured a certain amount of scorn on the apparent inauthenticiy of
the accents, despite the fact that they know nothing about the city, nothing worthwhile,
anyway. Take a look at most of the spurious reviews that have abounded in the
national press. Grace Dent, from The Independent, who apparently hails from
Cumbria, has cast doubt on the validity of the second city’s intonation as
depicted in the series. Lazy journalism from the increasingly downmarket,
militantly PC liberal press, as usual.

Cillian Murphy, an Irish actor, who could probably
have done much more, albeit superficially, with his pretty boy looks, doesn’t just look the part of a Small Heath villain,
he sounds like one to a tee as well. When he struts down the terraced streets, his
dead eyes always ready for combat, he makes people run, not towards him but
well away. Good looks and incipient violence can have that effect. I have seen
his type many times in Birmingham. The charm mixed with menace. It is
Birmingham personified.

His biggest achievement, as well as that of writer Stephen
Knight, is to make Birmingham look like an epic environment around the post-World
War 1 period. This has come as a shock to many, who still perceive my city as
something of a shithole, if I may be frank. Spaghetti Junction, the old Digbeth
coach station, ‘landmarks’ such as the cylindrical Rotunda building, have
frequently been mocked as evidence of an ugly urban landscape.

Peaky Blinders puts that all into a wider historical context. Because we are an industrial city, the ‘workshop of the world’ at
one point and one which produced the Spitfire during World War II,, as well as thousands
of cars from British Leyland’s Longbridge plant. We have been presented as a
dull city, with which the apparently grating tones of our accents have tended to
dovetail. But there has always been drama in Birmingham, some of it tragic, some
of it uplifting, and not just on Broad Street on a Saturday night,

It was one of the main centres of the Chartist
movement in the 19th century, which fought bravely to win working
men the right to vote.We became the car
manufacturing centre of the world in the early 20th Century and one
of the most heroic moments of that legacy was when 30,000 Birmingham engineers
marched down to Saltley Gates in solidarity with striking miners to close down
the coking plant there at the time. Aston Villa also won the European Cup in
1982. I was there during the celebrations. The roof tops were replete with the teaam's colours,
claret and blue. Tom Hanks is also a big fan of the club, part of strange coterie of well-known names that follow the team's fortunes.

There have been very bad times too. The Birmingham
pub bombings of 1974 were sickening. They took many innocent lives. Worst still
it happened in a city where many Irish-born people had made their homes, my
parents included. I was only seven but I remember the unbearable pain. The loss
of life was dreadful but the backlash against the Irish community was a
nightmare too.

Peaky Blinders is an eye-opener, not only because it
presents my home city as an epic environment: a crashing, thudding arena of
constant industry amid bloody vendettas but also because 1919 Birmingham is a
ethnical melting pot. There is a large Chinese community, the Italians have a
marked presence and of course the Irish abound in their numbers.

The Irish will always be a part of Birmingham but
the Asians and Afro-Caribbean’s have joined the rest of what is one of the UK’s
truly multi-ethnic centres of excellence. I particularly enjoyed the presence
of locally-born Benjamin Zephaniah,
towards whom the Shelby family are utterly colour blind. If that is not a
lesson in which life does not move inexorably forward, I don’t know what is.

I
have many fond memories of Peaky Blinders. Polly’s toughness, hand on a most
wonderful curvaceous hip, Billy Kimber’s arrogance until Tommy got him one
straight between the eyes but above all my home city, Birmingham, in all its
wondrous historical majesty.

Tonight
I was passing an off-licence on Vigarage Road, Kings Heath near where I live. There was a row going
on with empty bottles waving around. Unfortunately, not an unusual sight in
these parts on a Saturday night but part of me wished that Thomas Shelby might
turn up to put an end to it.. There is violence of one kind, mindless you might call it, and then there is violence of another ilk altogether, that of protection. Peaky Blinders errs towards the latter. A staunch defender of the UK's second city.

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

Back in November last year I met up in London withthe owner of a Zagreb-based real estate research company, named Red
Star (http://www.redstar.eu.com/), who I had previously contributed articles to his blogspot. I was there to
discuss an idea both he and I had to launch a new real estate magazine covering
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

We brain-stormed some ideas and agreed that I should
go away and think of a structure for the new publication. Through a fair bit of
trial and error, as is the case in these situations, I came up with one, which
divided CEE into three sub-regions, North-Eastern Europe, Central Eastern
Europe and South Eastern Europe. I also set about recruiting another two
journalists, one based in Budapest, who would write about Central Eastern
Europe – Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania – and the other
South Eastern Europe, consisting of the countries of the former Yugoslavia,
Albania and Bulgaria. My own patch, North Eastern Europe, would involve
following developments in the Baltic States, Poland and Ukraine. Having worked
for other commercial property magazines I knew this structure was an original
one. During this time I was also engaged in other preparations for the
magazine: liaising with the publisher and helping to get a sales representative
on board. This lasted for a period of some months during which I received no
pay.

Admittedly, when the first issue did come out, I was
well remunerated but given the efforts I had put in leading up to that I didn’t
think it unjustified. The magazine was also very well-received.

Real estate is a tough sector to write about, more
difficult than covering other parts of the business world. As one source once
said to me “in some languages the name for it is ‘immobilia”, that is it doesn’t
move much”. Finding news on the market can be frustrating. But that did not
prevent me from trying and I thought we came up with some original and varied articles,
focussing on the different sectors of office, retail and logistics from as many
of the countries on our beats as we could muster. Getting hold of company representatives to do
interviews with us was by no means easy half the time, given that many were
on business trips or were on holiday. The publisher also had a habit of
disappearing without notice for weeks at a time as well, only then to turn up
expecting everything to be in full swing.

With the third issue, which was due to coincide with
an annual event Red Star held every year, things took an alarming turn, at
least for me as a journalist. After being away from work for several weeks the
publisher contacted me on a Tuesday and said he wanted us to arrange an
interview with a company within the next few days before the CEO went on
holiday on Friday. This, after I had already given the other journalists and
myself a set of assignments. I told him that this was a very tall order to
arrange at such short notice, which he acknowledged.

What I did not realise at the time was that this
article was supposed to be paid for by the company being interviewed. In
magazine publishing this is not uncommon but it invariably involves informing the
reader that the article has been ‘sponsored’. However, in this case, the
publisher had no intention of pointing this out and was happy for it to be
presented as a normally-researched article. This contravenes all the ethics of
journalism, which anyone with a modicum of intelligence will be aware of.

That particular article went unpublished and now the
owner of the company appears to be reluctant to pay me for the four articles I
wrote for that issue, as well as three others I spent a good deal of time
editing. He has accused me of wasting his money, when this situation should
never have arisen in the first place. Had things continued in the same vein, my
job as editor would have become redundant anyway, as he seemed perfectly
willing to go over my head in order to fulfil his squalid, money-grabbing aims. What had begun as a decent magazine was in the process of becoming a mere brochure.

All businesses need time to flourish and perhaps
magazine publishing more than most. Not realising this is, in my view, a route
to disaster, one the head of Red Star seems ever keen to follow.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013

Allow me to call myself one of ‘Thatcher’s
children’, though if that had literally been the case I would have disowned
her. If the other way round had been the state of affairs the separation would
have occurred as a matter of course, inevitably.In 1979 when she was elected prime minister I
was 12 years old but it was only when she really got into her stride at the
helm that I myself truly came of age, if I can claim that. I was a teenager
after all.

I remember quite vividly the party election
broadcasts from that campaign in 1979, despite my tender years at the time. Leading
figures in the Labour party, such as Callaghan and Healey, appeared on the tiny
television my family had in a small room to warn of the travails the country
would have to endure if they elected the Tories to power. Mine was a safe
Labour home, parented by Irish immigrants, so even though I had just started
wearing long trousers to school, I agreed with that. Little did I know that
much of what they warned of was 100% correct.

My father, a proud and hard-working employee at one
of Birmingham’s most illustrious plants, was made unemployed soon after
Thatcher took up the reins. The effects on our family are easily imaginable to
anyone with the imagination required.

In 1984, aged 16, I was among a large crowd –
several hundred strong - attending a meeting staged by the Socialist Workers
Party (SWP). Tony Cliff was the main speaker. He said what I had been hoping to
hear on that day about the miners' strike. That the closure of the pits was part of a general attack on
the British working class..I agreed
with him fully. I joined the SWP soon afterwards.

That year was a fascinating one. I went to a
demonstration in Nottingham and saw how passionate the miners were to their
cause. With other ‘comrades’ I sat warming my hands over a boiler on a picket
line in the Cotswolds. You couldn’t be anything but be impressed by the resolve
of those miners. And they were from a pit that were the minority out on strike.
The refrain, however, was “She’ll not get me back”. “She”, meaning Thatcher. We
visited the house of one miner who had been arrested, I believe on more than
one occasion as a result of the strike. He’d also been a soldier in Northern
Ireland. He was more resolute than any of the others. Thatcher has been
described as divisive. She certainly was in his case. He stepped over to the
other side completely.

I went to university, became active again in political
activity, got tired with it and then concentrated on books. Then came a day in
London.

The poll tax riots. I had seen other
Thatcherite-generated violence in London before but never anything like that.
It was mayhem and for a time the people on the demonstration had control of the
streets. Police officers were running away from members of the public shouting
“no poll tax!” repeatedly. Then a police van sped down the street straight at
protestors. Miraculously, no one was killed. But one thing was clear enough.
The people of the UK had had enough of Thatcher. Even the shop workers were
chanting “no poll tax!” on that day. I was just scared of the police. That was
another indicator of life back then. You can speak of the free market all you
want and how it liberated people from the so-called bureaucratic post-war
consensus but Thatcherism also gave policemens’ batons a free hand.

Today, David Cameron said, “We are all Thatcherites
now”. I am not. I am a Socialist. I am an anti-Thatcherite. What I experienced
during my teenage years will not leave me, nor should it ever. Hopefully one
day there will be a proper tribute to the victims of that woman’s legacy,
someone who trod on the lives of countless number of working class people,
including that of my own family

Friday, 15 March 2013

I am beginning to warm to this Eric Joyce guy.
At least when he gets tanked up he doesn't just pick on just anyone. He
goes and batters other politicians. The UK population's id at work, in
other words. He is also an excellent argument against minimum pricing on
alcoholic drinks, one of a litany of shite ideas that Cameron and his
crew have come up with. Drunken hooligans can crop up anywhere, even in
Houses of Commons bars.